Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

601 Sourced Quotes

The most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority.

Kurt Vonnegut
You can't just eat good food. You've got to talk about it too. And you've got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food.

Kurt Vonnegut
One of the great American tragedies is to have participated in a just war. It's been possible for politicians and movie-makers to encourage us we're always good guys. The Second World War absolutely had to be fought. I wouldn't have missed it for the world. But we never talk about the people we kill. This is never spoken of.

Kurt Vonnegut
Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgment Day: We never asked to be born in the first place.

Kurt Vonnegut
Many people need desperately to receive this message: "I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone."

Kurt Vonnegut
I have to say this in defense of humankind: No matter in what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got there. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these crazy games going on, which could make you act crazy, even if you weren't crazy to begin with. Some of the games that were already going on when you got here were love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf and girls' basketball.
Even crazier than golf, though, is modern American politics, where, thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

Kurt Vonnegut
Quoth the doorbell with its silence, no comment at this time.

Kurt Vonnegut
Many people found our house spooky, and the attic in fact as full of evil when I was born. It housed a collection of more than three hundred antique and modern firearms. Father had bought them during his and Mother's six-month honeymoon in Europe in 1922. Father thought them beautiful, but they might as well have been copperheads and rattlesnakes. They were murder.

Kurt Vonnegut
Earthlings are the great explainers, explaining why this event is structured as it is, telling how other events may be achieved or avoided.

Kurt Vonnegut
She was an alcoholic. I didn't blame myself for that. The worst problem in the life of any alcoholic is alcohol.

Kurt Vonnegut
Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people's actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be. So the Galapagos Islands could be hell in one moment and heaven in the next, and Julius Caesar could be a statesman in one moment and a butcher in the next, and Ecuadorian paper money could be traded for food, shelter, and clothing in one moment and line the bottom of a birdcage in the next, and the universe could be created by God Almighty in one moment and by a big explosion in the next — and on and on.

Kurt Vonnegut
Trout trudged onward, a stranger in a strange land. His pilgrimage was rewarded with new wisdom, which would never have been his had he remained in his basement in Cohoes. He learned the answer to a question many human beings were asking themselves so frantically: "What's blocking the traffic on the westbound barrel of the Midland City stretch of the Interstate?"

Kurt Vonnegut
It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?

Kurt Vonnegut
Think of what a paradise this world would be if men were kind and wise.

Kurt Vonnegut
Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

Kurt Vonnegut
Old Norwegian Proverb: Swedes have short dicks but long memories.

Kurt Vonnegut
Everything that ever has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been.

Kurt Vonnegut
Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

Kurt Vonnegut
It shook up Trout to realize that even he could bring evil into the world — in the form of bad ideas.

Kurt Vonnegut
And what is literature, Rabo," he said, "but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the universe but a few molecules who have the disease called 'thought'.

Kurt Vonnegut
Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.

Kurt Vonnegut
High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.

Kurt Vonnegut
We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms. I used to think that science would save us, and science certainly tried. But we can't stand any more tremendous explosions, either for or against democracy.

Kurt Vonnegut
In a creative writing class of twenty people anywhere in this country, six students will be startlingly talented. Two of those might actually publish something by and by.

Kurt Vonnegut
All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

Kurt Vonnegut
If I hadn't spent so much time studying Earthlings," said the Tralfamadorian, "I wouldn't have any idea what was meant by 'free will.' I've visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.

Kurt Vonnegut
Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous.

Kurt Vonnegut
The New York Daily News suggested that my biggest war crime was not killing myself like a gentleman. Presumably Hitler was a gentleman.

Kurt Vonnegut
I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions.

Kurt Vonnegut
No matter which one wins, we will have a Skull and Bones President at a time when entire vertebrate species, because of how we have poisoned the topsoil, the waters and the atmosphere, are becoming, hey presto, nothing but skulls and bones.

Kurt Vonnegut